Dear D3.
This is day 213 for me playing MPQ.
I just decided to quit playing this game.
Here’s why you failed to make me a satisfied customer that could have given you money:
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Alliances. You get worse rewards if you play solo, meaning that you HAVE to play with an alliance unless you feel okay with missing out on some rewards. This creates a need to play with others, even if you might not actually want to do it. It creates expectations to play a lot and reach good results, and lots of conflicts among the players when you fail to do so. In order to keep the alliance rolling, you also discover that the alliance needs micro-management, like having a Facebook group and/or chat, reporting results, checking if all players are “doing their job” and so on. Of course, this is only applicable in the case of competitive alliances, but if an alliance isn’t competitive, I really don’t see why you should even have an alliance. The whole point with the alliances is to get better rewards, together, through teamwork. So…overall, I feel alliances was the wrong way to go, it made the game feel more like a grind and less like fun. Like so many other players have told me, they want to control WHEN they play and HOW MUCH they play. I feel the same way now, I’m “burned out” from constant season-grinding for several months.
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Worse rewards when playing solo. Yeah, this it closely tied in with the previous reason, but still, it’s bad that you can’t choose to play solo and still get the same rewards. Alliances should be about getting more iso and hero points, which is what we all need in the long run.
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No way to convert hp to iso. This is a major dealbreaker for me. Most games I have seen on Facebook and cellphones, where you have a “premium currency” (hero points, in this case) have a way to convert the premium currency into “freemium currency” (iso, in this case). I generally go plus on hp when I play events, due to good getting decent rankings and using shields sparcerly. So I get lots of hp, which I mostly just want to spend on more shields, and in the end I feel the hp is more or less useless for me. Sure, I could buy those worthless cover packs of yours (more on that later) where I never get what I need, or I can spend insane amounts of hp on buying individual covers for horrible prices (more on that later), but ultimately, the hp’s don’t do much for me and everything is so overcosted, but I WOULD have been happy to exchange hp for iso if the rates for it were decent, like 100 hp = 10.000 iso (which is just 3-5 levels for a high-level character).
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Horrible pricing on just about everything (warning: This turns into a long rant). I’m no whale, nor will I ever be, but several times I have pondered the possibility to buy a few things, had the prices been right. But they weren’t. Let’s look at the actual prices then, shall we? In euros, to make it a little easier, as my national currency (Swedish krona) is not well-known. 1,5 euro to buy 200 hero points. Well, for a new player, that might be relevant, but for veteran players like me, 200 hp buys me absolutely nothing. Or I could get 1200 iso for the same price. Wow. Not. That’s a single level for a mid-level character, or half a level for a high-level character. Not even worth it. At all. But 1,5 euros DOES buy me a 1,5 litre soda. Guess what I value more in that equation? For about 4 euros, I get 600 hp. Wow. A new character slot. How incredibly economic. Or 3.200 iso. One level for a high-level character. Seriously? Not even worth discussing. I just won’t pay 4 euros for that. Micro-transactions, my dear “friends” at D3, that’s how you make players pay for things in the game. It just goes on to be more and more crazy: 15 euro for 2.900 hp or 13.200 iso. I can buy myself several cheap phone games for that amount, or 1-3 budget games for my consoles. In game terms, the iso amount does almost nothing for me, but the hp amount can at least let me advance two powers individually. The amounts of 8.500 and 20.000 hp is sure high enough to do me some real good, but I just can’t justify paying 38 or 75 euros for it, that’s huge sums that can buy me lots of other good stuff in REAL life, you know? And the iso amounts you get for those prices, 37.500 and 78.000, is just laughable. I burn such amounts in no time, when levelling just ONE of my high-level characters. So please, get real. Paying 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 euros would be okay with me. I would actually BUY things in the game with such prices. And if I could get maybe 500, 1250, 2000, 2750, and 3500 hp for those amounts (each level giving you 250 hp more than if you would have bought several lesser levels), I would feel happy. And regarding iso, the amounts should be about 20.000, 50.000, 80.000, 110.000 and 140.000. 1 euro for either 500 hp or 20.000 iso, who would buy? LOTS of players! And selling imaginary things to lots of players IS what you at D3 want to do, right? So do you keep having such crazy prices for such lousy amounts of game currencies? Let me just mention the cover packs too. 100 hp for one semi-random cover, okay. I could pay that, but since the rates for good characters are so low, it always feels like being cheated. Then you sell a 10-pack for a MUCH higher price and claims that the rates for getting good characters are higher, but those rates are completely laughable and paying 2.800 hp for it is complete madness! I would fair much better if I bought 28 single covers than buying one 10-pack, guaranteed! And buying a 40-pack doesn’t even increase the chances over the 10-pack, but four 10-packs would cost me 11.200 hp and one 40-pack costs me 11.200 hp, so what am I missing here? Where’s my incentive to buy a 40-pack over four 10-packs? It’s NOWHERE, because there IS no reason! I’m not getting more covers, I’m not getting better chances, according to the odds table. Regarding the higher-priced covers, 200 hp seems too much for one random cover, a 10-pack has marginally better chances for getting the PvP character but for other characters the rates are EXACTLY the same! And I can buy 19 single covers with the hp amount I need to buy a 10-pack, so…not much of an incentive there, no. The 40-pack is actually a 42-pack, but what difference does it make since the rates still aren’t any better than for the 10-pack and only marginally better than for the single covers? Four 10-packs would cost me 15.200 and a 42-pack costs me 15.800…wait, what? So I pay 600 hp more for just TWO extra covers which are marginally better? Seriously? Actually, this is nothing else than a big, fat scam! And don’t even get me started on advancing single powers of a character. 125 hp for a 1-star character is reasonable, but from there to 500 hp for a 2-star character and 1250 hp for a 3-star is crazy, not to mention those 2500 hp to advance a 4-star character! 125, 500, 1250 and 2500, what an explosive expansion in costs! More reasonable amounts would be 125, 250, 500 and 1000.
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Too poor odds when getting tokens or buying covers and covers packs. Already discussed this in the post above, but it needs to improve, drastically. Getting or buying a token now is more of a joke, you rarely get something useful. Getting those “special” tokens from events stopped feeling special when you got 2-star characters 98% of the time. I think I have actually got over 50 such special event tokens without getting a single gold! The rates for those tokens must be extremely bad! Wow, I got a special token, it almost always contains something I don’t need, why even bother with it? It always feels like nothing but garbage.
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Shields should be more variable in lenghts and costs. It’s not really a dealbreaker for me, but I feel there’s much room for improvement here. 3 hours, 8 hours and 24 hours doesn’t really cut it. Sometimes I want to shield for only 6 hours, but sure, since there’s an 8 hour shield I could use that instead, no big difference. But sometimes I want to shield for 10-16 hours. Buying a full day shield feels very expensive then, and buying two lesser shields makes almost the same cost (sometimes exactly the same) while not getting anything extra for the trouble, and also having to actually buy shields at two different times. Maybe some players would rather play right when the event opens and then shield right away, with a longer shield? So here’s a suggestion for more diverse shields, with better costs: 3, 6, 9, 12, 24 and 48 hours, for the costs of 50, 75, 100, 150, 200 and 300 hp.
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Constant bugs and no bug fixing. Things like the enemy activating powers too early because the game calculates wrong, or losing AP for no reason (I’ve seen it happen several times lately, one turn I have AP to use a power, but I wait and the next turn I suddenly lack an AP and NO, the enemy didn’t have the possibility to steal AP from me, not by using OBW, not by using The Hood, not by using environment abilities, not in any other way, just NO…because it’s just a weird bug). Then the incredibly intelligent answer from your customer service: “We can’t reproduce the bug so we can’t help you”. PLEASE! Just play the game a few times and you WILL see the bug, and yet it appears so randomly that I can’t reliably catch it on video. But no, the customer service won’t even try to look for the bug and the programmer’s obviously doesn’t even know it exists or won’t look for it. There are other bugs, and of course the ever-present “comm link disrupted” error, which always shows up at the worst possible situations. So take our complaints seriously.
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Constant flow of events. PLEASE, let us have a breather every now and then, otherwise the game turns into a constant grind-fest. When I started playing, there was one event every week. One. And it was usually a PvP and it only lasted two days or less. The rest of the time, we battled in the story, and in the ever-ongoing Shield PvP. At that time, I wished there were more things happening, but from that extreme to this, where there are always at least two things happening, and sometimes more, there must be a golden middle way somewhere. Previously it was too little, now it’s too much, and yes, you DO feel that you HAVE to play EVERY event. And you get tired of it.
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PvE’s don’t work well. For one thing, I always feel the PvE’s are too long, and the terms change too much. Sometimes it’s an incredibly long event with the same missions that you just have to grind over and over, sometimes the missions vanish over time, without warning, so you don’t know how much you have to play and when you have to play. Sometimes the rubberbanding is strong and lets you play late to get a good score, sometimes the rubberbanding is almost non-existent and requires you to play right from the start and keep playing through the event. The end times shift, and most of the end times are geared toward the USA crowd, so us Europeans and also the Asians are often at a disadvantage. And all the time the enemy levels keep rising to ridiculous levels, that ultimately prevent us from playing, but most of all, the PvE’s demand such a big time investment, you have to play and play and play for a long time and in the end you still lose your good rank, because most of the action happens in the last hour and if you have the misfortune to live in Europe, where most of the PvE events end at 6 AM in the morning, you either have to stay up all the night or go up extremely early, just to play, and that just feels very unfair. And you can’t even put up a shield to protect your score, like in the PvP’s, which is also a big problem. In the end, the PvE’s feel like huge fails on so many levels that I just don’t want to play them, except to get lots of iso.
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The end times s*ck. As I mentioned above, most of the end times are strongly geared towards the USA crowd. Sure, most of your players live there, but why forget about the rest of the world? I and other players have pointed out alternative solutions to this problem several times but you never seem to listen. One of the easier solutions would be to present four identical events, instead of one, where every event had a different end time, with six hours apart. When you choose one event, you’re “locked” to that event and can’t play the other events, so you’re effectively choosing the event with the end time that suits you best. But instead, you’ve continued to present events with bad end times, forcing Europeans, Asians and others, to either stay up extremely late or go up extremely early, just to play at those important, last moments. With the solution I mentioned and/or a way to get and keep a good score without having to play all the time, this wouldn’t be a problem anymore. So fix it in some way.
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Brackets don’t work well. You know the drill: You fight like crazy to get 950 points (or whatever) and you still end up in “top 50”. At the same time, some random guy shows up in the Facebook group and shouts happily about getting rank 1 with only a little over 600 points. WTF??? That’s the point where you’re ready to throw your phone out the window. Without opening the window first. Seriously, why such big differences? Brackets. Well, yeah, but still…and then we have all those crazy guys (no offense) in the hardcore alliances (X-Men 1-73, Shield, Django Unbuffed, Django Buffed, Django Gets ss-fcked, and whatever all their names are…still, no offence, I’m just joking around here) who gets 1300-1800 points, by using strange shield hopping tactics and whatnots. Why even bother with brackets and variable points levels for ranks, why now just say “you must get 1300 points to get rank 1-2, 1100 points for rank 3-5, 900 points for rank 6-10” and so on? Set scores, clear and understandable goals, everybody know’s the terms. Fair and square. Because variable ranks is just not fair to anyone. If I can get 900 points, why is it sometimes enough get me rank 2 but sometimes not enough for rank 10? Or even rank 25? This is the craziness that I’m sure no one here actually WANTS to see.
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The absence of a true puzzle mode (not really a dealbreaker either, but something that could be improved). Despite this being a puzzle game, it lacks a true puzzle modes, where you’re presented with a challenge and need to achieve something within a certain amount of time or a certain amount of moves. Other puzzle games have it, MPQ lacks it. It would be a nice touch to get some real, actual brain challenges.
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The game lacks true PvP. The PvP is more like PvC (Player versus Computer) and the computer is always annoying, either because it cheats (paragraph 7), because the AI s*cks (keeps making incredibly stupid moves for no reason), or because the enemy levels are too high and the team combinations are too unfair (like the enemy team having a goon that constantly produces mana, making the enemy team activating their powers way too often). At some enemy levels, you just can’t win anymore, because the game gets too powerful, and it’s sad that it has to be that way. Some fights you just can’t win, whatever you do. And let’s not mention the computer’s astounding ability to create cascades way too often, you’re more than convinced that the computers isn’t actually making random matchings, but rather making the moves with the highest chance to get crazy cascades…and that the computer actually creates the cascades it needs. True PvP would be interesting but also taxing for the servers, so I absolutely understand why it’s not being done, but at the same time it feels very wrong to call the event “PvP”, when it’s actually everything BUT PvP.
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Level inflation makes beginner characters useless. When we recently played the “Balance of Power” event (where all characters were raised to level 270) I realized that every character could and SHOULD be allowed to raise to the same level as others. Why should we keep 30 characters just for using them in some special events but never in other cases? If all characters could reach the same level, we would see more diverce teams and the game would be more fun. I think Balance of Power was an important wake-up call for some players, but even more it should have been a wake-up call for you at D3: Every character should be allowed to reach the same level. As long as the characters are properly play-tested and their abilities are properly balanced, there should be no problems with this.
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Not enough playtesting. The constant cry for characters to be nerfed (made worse) or “funbalanced” (made better) shows that the initial versions of the characters were not as good or bad as they should have been. Sure, the game needs balancing but it’s obvious that you at D3 just make a new character and never really play-test it before you release it. Things that are obvious to lots of players after only a small amount of gameplay, are things like you at D3 obviously miss, time after time. Why are you not playtesting the characters and balance them from the start before you release them? Constant patching and nerfing destroys a lot of the fun. So think things through before you do something.
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Cheaters. Just do something about them, will you? Most of the time, you don’t even seem to care when we report the cheaters.
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Embrace the Steam players. For real, give them the opportunity to migrate their game to a phone so they won’t feel locked to their computers all the time. Some of them actually want to play “on the go” too, you know?
I…THINK that was all.
(And the crowd goes wild, he finally shut up!)
I might have forgotten something (and the crowd gets crazy, why can’t he shut up???) but I guess I can add it later if that’s the case. So you see, you have lots of things to improve but you have already lost me and other players, so your battle is already kind of lost, but you can still try to keep the players you have. For me, this race is now over, and it is with mixed feelings I leave this game. 
